


The Ghost of Ryan Present

by Siria



Series: The One Where Ryan Aten't Dead [1]
Category: Buzzfeed Unsolved (Web Series)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-07
Updated: 2018-10-07
Packaged: 2019-07-27 09:48:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,098
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16216514
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siria/pseuds/Siria
Summary: "Great news!" Ryan said, grinning ear to ear. "I'm dead!"





	The Ghost of Ryan Present

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to trinityofone for betaing.

"Great news!" Ryan said, grinning ear to ear. "I'm dead!"

"The fuck you are." Shane kicked back the covers and sat up. True, this was one of those rare occasions when there was some circumstantial evidence in Ryan's favour. For one thing, Ryan was translucent, barely more than a sketch of himself outlined against the hotel room's wallpaper. For another, the last time Shane had seen him, Ryan had been lying still and small and unresponsive in a hospital bed. 

But given the impossibilities at play here—Ryan Bergara could not be _dead_ —Shane was choosing to rule this all inadmissible evidence in the Court of Shane's Brain.

He fumbled for his glasses, put them on, and squinted at the orange glow of the bedside alarm clock. 3:07a.m. Not quite two hours since he'd walked into the hotel lobby, but apparently that was more than long enough for him to doze off and develop a raging case of complex PTSD. 

Look, Ma, I'm a neurology case study.

"Sick, this is awesome!" Imaginary Ryan waved an arm through the TV screen. It passed through without a sound and with no hint of resistance. "I am a 100% genuine ghostly presence. _I'm_ the proof I was looking for. That's kind of Zen, huh?"

"You," Shane told imaginary Ryan firmly, "are a crumb of undigested beef or a fragment of underdone potato. Shut up." He picked up his phone, looked up the number for the hospital, and called. This was ridiculous, he was being ridiculous. This wasn't an omen. The doctors had been reassuring. "Hi, um, hello, I'm calling for an update on a patient in the Intensive Care Unit, Ryan Bergara?"

"Look, look, I can go through walls! That's something I always wanted t—" A few seconds of silence. "—better than _American Horror Story_ , though that wouldn't be hard."

Shane kept his gaze firmly trained on the scratchy brown comforter. 

"You think I can make the curtains move?"

There was a wait while the switchboard transferred him over to the right department, a wait for someone in the ICU to pick up the phone, a wait for the nurse to call up the correct chart. They weren't long waits, but it felt to Shane like being back in the car, trapped in that endless moment between the first squeal of brakes and the realisation that they were going to hit, they were—

Shane blinked and forced himself to pay attention to what the nurse was telling him. "Okay, great, thank you, but just so I'm entirely clear here, when you say 'critical but stable', you do mean he's still alive, right?"

The answer that got him wasn't exactly what you could call Iowa Nice, but the relief that flooded through him was strong enough that frankly, my dear, Shane didn't give a good goddamn. He thanked the nurse, untangled himself from the layers of sheets on the too-small bed, and staggered into the bathroom. 

"You hear that, hallucination? Ryan's still alive, you can fuck off now."

"That is medical fake news! I'm obviously and clearly a goner. That nurse just doesn't know how to tell when someone's braindead or not."

"Yeah, I bet she missed that day in nursing school."

What looked back at Shane in the bathroom mirror while he pissed could probably be the subject of its very own _Unsolved_ episode. Shane hadn't shaved in three or four days, but the patchy beard wasn't enough to hide the mottled bruising that darkened one side of his face. Friction burns—the air bag, the seat belt—had done a number on the rest of his face and neck and upper torso. 

"This newly discovered cryptid," Shane mumbled to himself as he washed his hands, "roams the plains of western Iowa, where the hog farms are plentiful and dumbasses say 'whatever' when even bigger dumbasses from southern California insist that they know how to drive just fine even when it's snowing."

He stepped back into the bedroom, scratching idly at his chest and trying to remember if he'd packed any Ibuprofen for the trip. Devon would have some, for sure, but even though she and TJ had been in the other car and were fine, Shane didn't think she'd welcome him knocking on her hotel room door in the small hours of the morning, looking for some sweet chemical release. Devon was a woman of great and elastic patience, but that patience wasn't infinite. 

Imaginary Ryan was standing right in front of him. Shane startled, tripped over his own feet, and landed on the bed. 

"So I've tried but I'm definitely not strong enough to manipulate electrical equipment," Ryan was saying, "but maybe through, like, force of will or some shit, you can get me on video? Or, oh, I can be the first ghost to knowingly appear on Facebook Live! That'd be pretty sweet."

"Well, self," Shane said, with all the deliberate calm he could muster. "You had a good run. Most people have their first psychotic break in their teens or twenties, but you made it all the way into your thirties before you started seeing the not-ghost of your living best friend—"

The imaginary Ryan beamed, the outlines of him growing fuzzy with what seemed like sheer delight. "You really think of me as your _best friend_?"

"—and all it took was a car crash and almost certainly a severe but medically undetected blow to the ol' giant noggin to bring it on. Certain people might even classify this as a kind of resilience. Good job!"

Shane stood on shaky legs and crossed over to the minibar. They were normally strictly forbidden—under pain of an awkward meeting with the BuzzFeed accountants and having to recreate the waxing scene from _Forty Year Old Virgin_ —from expensing anything from the minibar, but right now Shane thought the world owed him a couple of tiny whiskey bottles or twelve. 

He twisted open a bottle at random and poured it unceremoniously down his throat. It burned as it went down and Shane coughed and spluttered. "They don't make $17 shots of whiskey like they used to, I guess," he said, as he opened the next bottle with grim determination. 

"This is not healthy _or_ helpful," imaginary Ryan said. "Shane, c'mon. We've got shit to do before the tunnel appears to take me to the other side. Shane!" 

" _Na zdrowie_ ," Shane said, brandishing the bottle towards the ceiling in a grim toast before knocking it back. "Jesus Christ, this is a hate crime in a bottle."

"Shane—"

"Just _stop_!" Shane threw the empty bottle through imaginary Ryan. It bounced off the wall and rolled under the bed. "You are the most frustrating manifestation of an aneurysm the world has ever known. Why can't you just be a blood clot like a normal stroke?"

"Listen, time's wasting," imaginary Ryan continued as if Shane hadn't spoken. "It'll be light in a few hours, but if we leave now we should be able to make it back to Villisca before dawn, I'll see if I can talk to any of the Moores, and then we get to say we've solved a mass murder that's baffled people for more than a century! Well, you'll get most of the credit because I'm dead, but—"

Shane gathered up two handfuls of minibar bottles and heaved himself back up onto the bed. "Want to know how I know you're not the ghost of the real Ryan Bergara but are instead the inevitable masochistic outcome of a head injury combined with a childhood spent marinating in the emotionally restrained small-c conservatism of suburban Chicagoland?"

"Not—not _particularly_ ," imaginary Ryan said. "But I feel like somehow you're going to tell me anyway."

"Because the _actual_ Ryan would be terrified right now." Shane uncapped a miniature bottle of something that proclaimed itself to be a 'ripely fruitful Cabernet Sauvignon' but tasted like someone had tried to ferment a batch of Welch's grape juice in an old sock. Terrific. So many people making such excellent life choices to lead to this exact moment. Shane knocked back another mouthful. "He'd be shitting himself about the afterlife, but you know what else he'd be doing? He'd be trying his best to come back to us, he wouldn't be all, oh, you know what, this is a prime opportunity to drive back into the armpit of Iowa to go commune with the spirits of the brutally axed."

"Well, scientifically speaking—"

Shane groaned and put a pillow over his head. 

"—I'm pretty sure you need to have glands to feel fear, for you know, hormonal purposes. And I don't have them any more, so I guess I'm just rolling with it."

"Rolling with it," Shane said into his pillow. He thought again of the sound of the U-Haul truck hitting their rental car, the way they'd ricocheted into the crash barrier, the silence afterwards. Shane had been in fender benders before, but he'd never seen anything like that: never looked over to see someone sagging limply against their seatbelt, a thin trickle of blood running down their temple. 

"Yup." Imaginary Ryan's voice shifted, as if he were walking around the room while he spoke. Shane had to give props to his hippocampus. Sure, it was producing wild hallucinations, but it was still concerned with verisimilitude. Respect. "I guess once you cross over, you just see things from a different perspective, you know? All those petty human concerns sort of fade away, and you see to the heart of things."

Shane pulled the pillow away and stared blearily up at the ceiling. This was the weirdest guilt trip he'd ever been on, and that was saying something if you knew his grandmothers. "Maybe _I'm_ the one who died and I'm in purgatory right now, sentenced to spend a hundred thousand years listening to a version of Ryan Bergara talking like he just ate a freshman who's halfway through an intro to philosophy course."

"Or, counterpoint, how about you're once more refusing to acknowledge what's right in front of you, and that's just failing Logic 101, my dude."

Shane drained the last of the shitty wine and dropped the bottle on the floor. "Ah, the sage wisdom, the personal development, of the afterlife."

"Well, I don't think I can _change_ now," imaginary Ryan said. "That's the whole point of a ghost, not changing, when you think about it."

Shane curled onto his side, punched his pillow a couple of times to fluff it up, and willed his blood alcohol content to reach the tipping point that would make him doze off. Maybe tomorrow he'd see if his shitty insurance plan covered MRIs. Could MRIs diagnose whatever the hell this was? Maybe they'd revive Test Friends just to see. 

"I mean, mostly we're stuck in a loop. Reliving the moment of our deaths, wandering the same hallways over and over, trying to resolve our last great regret, you know: the usual."

Shane could feel himself starting to drift, $60 of shitty alcohol finally proving itself good for something. "So what," he mumbled, "the greatest regret of Ryan Bergara's ghost is that he spent three hours of his last day on earth listening to a spirit box regurgitate bits of the local NPR station? Because fuck, that wasn't my last day and I regret it too, so. Jesus, what are brains, even."

"Nah, that's not it."

"'kay, sure, your biggest regret is _actually_ that you didn't get the super jumbo size popcorn when we went to that one Indiana Jones marathon."

"Jumbo size alone barely got me to the mine chase bit! That's just a stain on the cinematic experience," imaginary Ryan protested. "But that's not it either."

"I just want you to know, mental projection o' mine, if you decide that Ryan's biggest regret is something to do with sportsball, you're going to break that verisimilitude streak you've got going, because what the fuck do I know. You'll have to wing it with your own dialogue from here on out."

"Jesus Christ, shut up. You are more infuriating than like… fifteen other really fucking annoying people stacked together into one really tall annoying person."

Shane felt obscurely complimented. "Thank you, hindbrain."

"I am here! Shane, look at me. _Look at me_. This is really me, or part of me. Haven't you even stopped to ask yourself why I'm here with _you_ , out of anywhere in the world I could have manifested?"

"Not really," Shane said. "More preoccupied with trying to baste my brain in delicious alcohol.” 

"Because it's you, numbnuts," Ryan said, almost tripping over his own words in his haste to get them out. "You're my biggest regret—not kissing you when I had the chance."

Shane's eyes flew open. There was a self-inflicted guilt trip, and then there was real sadism. He sat up and looked directly at imaginary Ryan. 

Imaginary Ryan looked right back at him, quiet now and solemn in the way that the real Ryan so rarely was: no fear in his eyes, no smile tugging at the corner of his mouth, just a look of steady conviction. He shrugged. "Not much point in being afraid anymore, right? I missed my chance and all I've got now is borrowed time, I could go completely at any moment, but you… you should know. You deserve that."

"Look, brain," Shane said, fighting to ignore how his voice cracked. "This seems like really extravagant, technicolour self-flagellation just because I jerked it in the shower to Ryan a time or three—"

" _What_?"

"You try not popping a boner when you see Ryan Bergara sweaty and shirtless after a run," Shane spat. 

"I am Ryan Bergara," said imaginary Ryan, spreading his arms wide. His voice was rising steadily in pitch, reminding Shane vividly of how Ryan had almost blown out his eardrums back in the Sallie House. "I just, I'm asking if—you never said anything! Never once, and I fucking full-on pined for you, dude! Do you know how much Curly teased me about mooning over you? And now I'm standing here in front of you and I'm telling you the thing I could never make myself tell you when I was alive because you'd, you'd just be _kind_ about it—but you're all gee whiz, Ryan's dead, guess it sucks I beat off to him!"

"You are just a part of my brain," Shane said slowly, carefully, because if you were going to have a genuine dark night of the soul, might as well make sure you articulated it all precisely to yourself. "You're the part of my brain that wants to make me think that Ryan ever _would_ —"

"Dude," imaginary Ryan said softly. "You like me."

Shane met imaginary Ryan's gaze. What the hell—for thirty seconds or so, he could let himself pretend. It wasn't like anyone would ever know, other than Shane, and there was a decent chance Shane would keel over from a traumatic brain injury in a few hours. "I'm at least sixty per cent in love with you, Ryan. I've been regretting you for months already and you almost died last night and I hate that I know I'm going to visit you in the hospital and still be too chicken-shit to say anything."

"Holy shit, you _like_ me." Imaginary Ryan beamed at him with tentative but growing delight. "Oh wow, okay, I guess this is the kind of feeling you don't need glands for."

"I mean, I think they _help_ ," Shane said. He was pretty sure he was constitutionally incapable of agreeing with any version of Ryan, even the one his hindbrain had conjured up out of loneliness and desperation and an impulse towards self-torture of a scale that would be surprising even to someone who'd read his ninth-grade poetry assignments. 

"Maybe," imaginary Ryan said, "but I don't need any kind of hormone assist on this one, buddy. I already know I want to romance the shit out of you. If I was still alive, if I could touch you right now, you'd know that. Shane…"

Shane shivered. There was a part of him that wanted to believe in this, so very badly—not to believe that Ryan was dead, but to believe that he'd ever think of Shane that way, ever want him so openly.

"You've got to believe me," imaginary Ryan insisted. "I'm not fooling around here."

Shane scrubbed his hands through his hair. "This is just… very persistent misplaced anxiety. If I call the hospital back, they'd tell me there's no change in his condition. He is fine. He is _okay_. Breathe."

"If I could just—if you…" Imaginary Ryan furrowed his brow, considering, and then turned to look at the table next to him. A complimentary hotel-branded pen and pad of paper sat on it. Imaginary Ryan stretched out his hand, and Shane _felt_ something, like being in a high-rise elevator climbing so fast your ears popped. Imaginary Ryan's fingertips brushed the pen, and the pen moved. It moved, it rolled off the table onto the floor, and Shane stopped breathing. 

The smile Ryan turned on him was blinding. "I _can_. I—oh my god, Shane…" He took two steps towards Shane, then stopped, his face twisting in confusion. His mouth worked like he was trying to speak, but no sound emerged. 

"Ryan?" Shane half rose, reaching out, and for the briefest moment his fingers met something—not warm flesh, but still unmistakably present. Then Ryan's outline fizzled and flickered, and he was gone. 

For an endless moment, Shane stared at the spot where Ryan— _Ryan_ —had been, and then his phone chirped. Muscle memory alone had him reaching out and swiping to answer. He cleared his throat. "Yeah?"

"He's awake," T.J. said, his voice a weird mix of groggy and relieved. "The hospital called, he just woke up, he's asking for us. We're heading over there now. Meet us in the lobby in ten?"

Shane dragged his suitcase over and rummaged through it for a clean shirt. "I'll be down in five," he said, and hung up. He pulled on his clothes and jammed his feet into his sneakers with shaking hands, then sat heavily down on the edge of the bed and buried his face in his hands. Shane gave himself the space of a few hitching breaths, before getting up again and opening the curtains. The snow had stopped, and the steadily brightening sky was a clear and cloudless blue: the best kind of weather for wiping away all regrets.


End file.
